The Material And Carving Process Of QingTian Stone

QingTian Stone is well known in China as "four famous stones" with BaLin Stone,Shoushan Stone and Changhua Stone. Since ancient times, all the famous and nobleslove and praise Qingtian Stone. In this paper, I sum up the gemological characteristicsof QingTian Stone and its historical development of carving art based on extensiveliterature reviewing. The mineral components and the genus of QingTian Stone arecomplex and diverse. Most of QingTian Stone belong to pyrophyllite type and thereare also a few types of dickite, illite and sericite as the main mineral components.Predecessors usually classify QingTian Stone by color, textures, mining areas andtypes of minerals. QingTian Stone has a long history. I divided its history into sixperiods on the whole which are the primitive period, brief period, beautiful andpractical period, exquisite period, vibrant and auspicious period and the varied period.There are four kinds of tools of traditional QingTian Stone carving which are thechisel, the carving knife, the wagon drilling and the thrust bar. The process ofQingTian Stone carving include that selected and design, prime carved, colored,hollowed out,fine carved and smoothed, cushion packed, polished and waxed.All the samples are tested by conventional gemological apparatus and advancedlarge instruments. Then they are assigned reasonable. At the same time, I practice theskill of stone carving at Shirenxuan art studio in Beijing and create twelve works,including nine works of seven different species of QingTian stone, three contrastcarving species which are one pyrophyllite TaiShun stone carving work, onepyrophyllite GuangDong Stone carving work and one brucite carving work. I discussthe influence of modern carving tools on QingTian stone carving industry on the basisof the carving practice. I classify the samples into three types which are the singlecolor, the multicolor and the feature. Then I analyze them by the characteristic of therough stone, design, carving, tools using and skills. I also find that differentgemological properties make the design of carving, techniques of processing, the useof tools and the sense of carving different. On this basis, I combine the sense of carving and gemological characteristics of QingTian stone to obtain a new methodcalled “the identification of carving sense”. It could be divided into five grades whichare comfort, smooth, unevenness, sticky and viscous. If combine them with the colorand texture of stone, then it would be more accurate to distinguish the varieties ofQingTian Stone. After absorbed the essence of traditional carving process of QingTianStone, combined with the carving process of jade and the idea of modern design, Isum up a set of suitable process of modern QingTian Stone carving for design collegestudents or stone enthusiasts which contains stone phasing, designing, engraving,polishing and optimization. On the basis of previous studies, I summarize thevaluation of the carving art of QingTian Stone, including the evaluation of originalstone and the evaluation of stone carving process.Hope this paper which combine the carving art of QingTian Stone and its materialresearch would let more people understand and love QingTian Stone.